7 Tips For A Happy Healthy Holiday Season

Happy Holiday Season! I love this time of year, everyone seems to be in a generally better mood. Let’s keep the good moods coming and plan for a happy healthy holiday! Here are my 7 tips for a happy healthy holiday season!

Prioritize Sleep: Try to get a solid 7-8 hours every night! Only stay out late on the nights you know you can sleep in the next morning. Have to be up early? Turn in early!

Have a Nutrition Game Plan: This will make a huge difference! I wrote a post at Thanksgiving with tips for making healthy food choices here. Prioritize your vegetables and protein!

Less Coffee, More Tea: Around the holidays we tend to look to caffeine for that extra little boost. After your regular cup of coffee, try to get any additional caffeine from green tea. Preliminary research is linking green tea to reduced cortisol (stress hormones) levels, while it’s too soon to recommend an optimal dose there are still many other benefits to its consumption. You can read more about it here.

Increase Your Anti-inflammatory foods: The holidays are filled with lots of delicious goodies! Unfortunately, these goodies have very little nutritional value and can cause inflammation to increase in the body. Combine that with lack of sleep and increased stress and you have the perfect environment for an unhappy gut! Adding in foods such as fresh fruit and veggies, turmeric and ginger can help decrease inflammation in the body. Please check with your Dr before adding in turmeric if you are on any medications as it may cause an interaction. You can find a delicious turmeric milk recipe here.

Be Kind To Your Gut: Along with the above tips try to be mindful of what your putting in your body. Making sure that at least 80% of your food intake is still veggies, meat, healthy fats and whole grains which will keep you feeling satisfied. An overload of refined sugar and white flour creates a breeding ground in your gut for bad bacteria and can be difficult to reverse. I like to pass on most sweets and save room for the ones I really love……chocolate peanut butter balls! After a big plate of veggies and turkey it’s easy for me to just have on or two because I’m not hungry.

Simplify Christmas: Christmas is a very busy time of year. It should be something we look forward to, not dread. This year I decided I was going to buy the people closest to me a simple gift they will enjoy and not worry about buying tons of presents or finding the “perfect” gift. We got a small tree that I am decorating today and I’ll pull out a few decorations. It can be so easy to lose site of the true meaning of Christmas, it was never meant to be about the show but rather about love, joy and peace. You can read a blog post about this topic by one of my favorite authors, my mom, here. This Christmas try giving out of LOVE, celebrating with JOY and taking time to enjoy the PEACE that this special celebration was meant to bring.